Kelly Jensen - Body Talk: 37 Voices Explore Our Radical Anatomy

We all experience the world in bodies, but rarely do we take the time to really explore what it means to have and live within them. Just as every single person has a unique personalityshaped both by biology (nature) and by the world around them (nurture)every single person has a unique body. We may live in a culture that suggests one type of body is the ideal model of what a person should look like and how they should function at a given time and in a given place, but every human body tells its own story, and its a story we each write for ourselves.

Bodies arent simply biological. They are radical tools. They are physical and political. They impact our mental well-being as much as they impact our social roles.

Body Talk delves into what it means to operate a body within a twenty-first-century Western world, and offers but one perspective among many others around the world and throughout history. This book goes beyond puberty and beyond body confidence to bare it all.

The late chef and author Anthony Bourdain wrote, Your body is not a temple, its an amusement park. Enjoy the ride. Body Talk aims to throw open the gates to the park so you can better experience the highs, the lows, the thrills, and the chills of the human body.

We are more than the sum of our parts.

Whether we have ten fingers and ten toes, whether we have two arms and two legs, whether weve got metal rods and screws holding us together, or whether we have none of the above, there is so much more to having and living in a human body than our particular structure. Our bodies are political as much as they are physical.

This section delves into the ways our anatomy works for us and the ways our anatomy may differ fromor conform to!the ideal human body. Itll also question what, if anything, that ideal is.

Scoliosis, Spinal Fusion, and Stomach Punches

by Rachael Lippincott

It was ninety-two degrees out, and I was wearing a baggy blue tie-dyed sweatshirt. It was the only article of clothing I had that hid both my curvature and my back brace. So, naturally, I wore it until the white letters were peeling off, my swim teams name wiped from legible existence in my endless pursuit to hide my scoliosis.

This day, though, I was in absolute agony. It felt like a bad reenactment of the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, when Keira Knightley passes out from her suffocating corset and tumbles over a ledge into the ocean below.

Except I ended up crying in the back seat of my moms forest-green Saturn. The AC blasted as I ripped the Velcro straps open, a waterfall of sweat pouring off my body, like I too had just been rescued from the depths of the ocean. It was there, lying in the back seat while we drove home, that I began to seriously consider if I wanted to keep doing this.

If I didnt continue with the brace, Id need surgery. A ten-hour spinal-fusion surgery to correct the steadily progressing S-shaped curve in my back.

I had always been a sloucher.

I remember my grandma pulling my shoulders back when I was sitting at her dining room table, telling me about the importance of having good posture, like I were an eighteenth-century heiress at finishing school. I remember my flute teacher telling me over and over again to sit up straighter, my slumping making it an absolute nightmare to get any air into my diaphragm.

For the most part, though, I ignored them. It was exhausting not to slouch. It took so much energy for me to suck in my stomach and shove my shoulders back that I didnt really see the point in doing it.

Until one day, I saw a picture of what I looked like. And I saw what theyd been talking about for all those years.

It was a low-quality photo, taken on a 2004 Razr flip phone. (This baby was the phone to have back in the day. It was the AirPods of the prehistoric era.)

The picture was from the summer before sixth grade. I wasnt doing anything particularly remarkable. Just chilling at my friends birthday party, wearing an old soccer jersey from the four minutes I played soccer, grinning as I talked about whatever I found interesting as a ten-year-old.

But what was remarkable about the photo was that it was the first time I saw how slouched over I really was.

I saw it all. The hunch of my shoulders. The way my right shoulder blade poked out farther than my left. The lower-stomach fat that pulled at the jersey fabric of my shirt, accentuated by the slouch of my upper body.

I felt a disdain for myself that Im not sure I had really felt until that point. And it was devastating.

It was only a few months later that I had a word to put to the appearance of my back. Scoliosis.

I remember bopping into gym class, excited for the usual Fun Friday tradition of indoor kickball, and being surprised when our gym teacher rounded us all up for a scheduled back prodding.

It was definitely something a little different for Fun Friday.

We all trotted out of the gym and stood in a line outside the girls locker room, wearing our orange-and-black gym clothes, going in one at a time to get checked by a doctor. The number of eye rolls was overwhelming. Theres nothing quite like a group of impatient sixth-grade girls dressed in their pumpkin- colored gym clothes, wanting nothing more than to be playing kickball but instead having some sixty-five-year-old dude we didnt know telling us if we had weird-shaped backs.

I remember heading into the locker room when Next! was called out, my mind already focused on the sound of basketballs reverberating around the gym, this little inspection nothing more than a forgettable pit stop. I followed his instructions, bending over and trying to touch my toes, my arms swinging in the breeze as a display of my unyielding inflexibility.

Its always reassuring when you get a sharp inhale from a doctor. I remember him holding the measuring device against my spine, my lumpy right shoulder blade nearly poking him in the eye while he prodded away.